test release of new PostScript font metrics

[Sebastian Rahtz <Sebastian.Rahtz@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

Over the last 9 months, a group of people have been working on a
revamp of TeX font metrics for PostScript fonts. We are now ready
(finally!) to release this, together with a new release of the
PSNFSS package for LaTeX2e, and a new version of the Berry fontnaming
scheme. The maintainers of PSNFSS, fontinst, web2c, and dvips all urge
you to start using this new setup, so that all the bothersome variants
can be abolished by the end of the year.

The entire distribution is on the CTAN hosts in
fonts/psfonts.beta. Its big - don't pull all the files on spec!
Get what you need. Prepackaged sets for Textures users will be made
available very shortly.

These files will replace both the LaTeX PSNFSS (currently on CTAN in
fonts/metrics) and the font metrics distributed with dvips.  Both of
these packages contained virtual fonts which more or less mimicked the
original TeX text encoding, and (in the case of PSNFSS) the Cork
encoding.  However, the two packages used different base fonts, thus
making previewing painful (and wasting disk space).  Now, everything
uses a single base font in a new encoding named 8r (see tools/8r.enc or
tools/8r.etx).

This new base encoding is *not* Adobe Standard Encoding, because that
does not provide access to all of the 228 characters normally supplied
with a Type 1 font.  Therefore, you must use a DVI-to-PostScript driver
which can perform reencoding, such as dvips(k), Y&Y's drivers, OzTeX,
Textures etc.

We are still contemplating whether the base encoding should be the
current one (mostly compatible with Windows), the texnansi encoding
promulgated by Y&Y (see tools/texnansi.vec), or something else.
Comments are welcome.

Aside from the base font, there are other small changes in the new
fonts.  For the Cork-encoded fonts, the stretch and shrink of the
interword spacing has been changed.  For the dvips fonts, the positions
of the preaccented characters have been fixed (e.g., Aring is at the
same position in every font).  Therefore, the font checksums are
different.  The actual character dimensions, however, remain unchanged.

The new fonts (mostly) have new names!  You can get the new fontname
distribution from ftp.cs.umb.edu:private/tex/fontname-*.tar.gz or in the
tools/ subdirectory of this distribution.

This distribution includes support the standard 35 fonts, various freely
available fonts (with type1's), and many commercial-only fonts (no
type1's).  Smallcaps and obliqued versions are available in bold and
normal variants, where applicable.  All fonts have ligatures and
kerning (no ``raw'' fonts); therefore, even the *8r base fonts can be
used for real typesetting. An experimental support is provided in
PSNFSS for this.

We built these fonts using both fontinst and afm2tfm (and other
utilities).  Both required changes, which will be merged into the next
releases.  See the tools/ directory if you want to reconstruct the
work. The changes to fontinst are extensive, and if you are not
confident you understand them, please wait until the author finds time
to merge them into a complete new release later this year.

*****************************************
Primary perpetrators: Sebastian Rahtz, Alan Jeffrey, Karl Berry.
Chief Tester and Bugfinder: Constantin Kahn.
Aiders and abettors: Tom Rokicki, Ciar\'an \'O Duibh\'{\i}n, Pierre MacKay,
  Rob Hutchings, Berthold Horn, Damian Cugley.

Please send any questions, comments, or suggestions
to tex-fonts@math.utah.edu.  (Email tex-fonts-request@math.utah.edu to
join the list.)

Sebastian Rahtz
May 1995